IPWatchdog Celebrates 25 Years, Gene Quinn Awarded for Lifetime Achievement, and Former USPTO Leaders Discuss Ways to Improve the Agency

On the final day of IPWatchdog LIVE 2024, Gene and Renee Quinn celebrated the organization’s 25^th anniversary with the IPWatchdog team and attendees of LIVE. In a surprise ceremony, Gene Quinn was also presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by his alma mater, the University of New Hampshire (UNH), Franklin Pierce Law School, for his service to and work with the IP community.

UNH Dean and Professor of Law Megan Carpenter presented the award, explaining that, since Quinn created IPWatchdog two years after graduating with his LLM, it has over the years evolved into much more than just a media company—it is now also an IP education company, an events and conference company, an advocacy and policy engine and “more than anything else, it is also community.” Quinn and IPWatchdog have made “such a mark on that mandate of promoting science and the useful arts,” Carpenter said. “We all love Gene because he says what he thinks, and true leadership entails, above all, authenticity.”

Carpenter then read the following dedication, which was printed on a certificate presented with the award:

Former USPTO VIPs Call for Change

Just before the 25^th anniversary celebration kicked off, attendees of IPWatchdog LIVE gathered at the final session of the meeting, which featured three former U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) leaders discussing the inner workings of the Office— from the role of employee morale in fostering a strong IP system to the need for the USPTO Director role to be more removed from partisan politics.

Former USPTO Directors Andrei Iancu and David Kappos joined former Commissioner for Patents Bob Stoll and IPWatchdog’s Gene Quinn on a panel in which they discussed the present state of the USPTO. One of the most pressing issues highlighted was examiner and employee morale at the Office. While the USPTO was once at the top of the Best Places to Work in the Federal Government list, today it sits at #236. The Office moved up in the rankings under the leadership of Kappos, who said he achieved that through “a lot of little things but it does come down to empowerment of the career employees.” Today, said Kappos, “the agency has become a lot more political and there’s no advancement of career employees.”

The reasons to care about employee morale are not limited to ensuring people are happy either, Kappos added. The real reason for focusing on the drivers of morale is because when people feel happy, they “get things done, they move applications, they grant cases that should be granted,” Kappos added. That all in turn leads to decreased backlogs and a better overall IP system.

Today, however, the backlog has crept back up, something current USPTO Director Kathi Vidal addressed recently in a blog post, calling it “inherited” and due to “unpredictable macro effects, including a pandemic that had an outsized impact on our application inventories.”

According to the Office’s recent Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on Setting and Adjusting Patent Fees, the present backlog is predicted to increase to 820,200 by FY 2026 before decreasing to 780,000 by FY 2029. The latest USPTO data shows the present backlog to be 802,955 unexamined applications/ 26.2 months total pendency for patents and 14.4 months total pendency for trademarks.

“When backlogs start going up it’s hard to get them under control,” Kappos said during Wednesday’s panel. “Attrition exacerbates the problem, and hiring too much gets you a revolving door situation.”

Iancu attributed some of the Office’s morale problems to the fact that it is now an “effectively 100% remote” organization. “In my view that’s an issue,” Iancu said. He explained:

“The USPTO was a pioneer on remote work, and it’s done great things for the Office, but before the pandemic it was at about 50% or so of fully remote employees. With the pandemic [the Office was] forced to go 100%, and since the pandemic ended the vast majority are not coming back in. It’s an issue for so many reasons. It cuts across so many aspects. If these examiners come straight into a remote environment, culturally, they don’t bond as they used to in the past. Before, the academy was mandatory and then you had to be in the office for two years before going remote. There’s much less sharing of information and knowledge and expertise.”

But Stoll noted that “[in person] work is not coming back,” and “so, I think we need to find tools that simulate in person training and community.”

While Iancu agreed that’s true, he said there are other steps that can be taken as well, such as requiring the academy to be in person again and requiring two years of on-site work, that would help with the morale problems.

Ultimately though, all three panelists agreed that one big factor impacting morale is the negative national discourse. “Neither of the presidential candidates has said patents are good,” Iancu said. “That reverberates to the USPTO employees.”

Kappos agreed and said that “one of the things that needs to happen is for the USPTO to be the clarion voice for patents and trademarks. It’s the USPTO that needs to be standing out on the tracks.”

As Director, Iancu said he had to “lay across those tracks” often. “And sometimes you have to go into the White House and say, ‘I’m sorry, we’re just not going to do it. And sometimes it comes at political cost to yourself, but that’s just part of the job.”

The panelists also discussed problems with the various pending rules packages at the Office, the reasons for low allowance rates by some examiners, and whether it might be wise to make the USPTO Director a position that would span administrations. “We need to think of ways of creating more stability, more continuity,” Iancu said.